We know that you were all holding your breath just waiting for Pantone to announce its 2012 Color of the Year. The long (well, year long) wait is over and “Tangerine Tango” has been announced as the winner of the prestigious honor.

Chosen because of its “sophisticated and dramatic undertones,” Tangerine Tango (Pantone 17-1463) is a continuation of last year’s winner, Honeysuckle (Pantone 18-2120). The 2011 winner was said to be “inspiration to face life’s everyday troubles with verve and vigor,” with Tangerine Tango building off of that by giving an “energy charge” to move forward. Pretty dramatic language, but these people takes their colors seriously.

The process of choosing the color of the year is quite an ordeal. Pantone employees look the world over for color influences in media, music, and art, searching for the hues that most affect people. With the digital age well underway, they also look at designs created electronically.

While all that sounds good to a fashion designer, or a makeup artist, why in the world would us geeks care? Because Pantone is still the standard when it comes to the hurdle of color matching across devices to create uniformity in design. If you are using an Adobe product in a professional capacity, odds are you are using the Pantone pallet in some of your projects.

For those unfamiliar with Pantone, the company started out in the 1950’s as a printing house. Upon hiring a Hofstra grad name Lawrence Hebert, the company began work on creating a color standard that would guarantee uniformity across different devices.

If you have ever experienced picking out a color for paint or created a design on your computer, only to have the final product look completely different than what you saw, the Pantone color matching process is the answer to that.